“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Here the basic experience is hastily dressed up as much as possible in physical clothes. This is not because you want to understand the experience, but because you refuse to accept it as basically nonphysical. All dreams are not of this nature. Some dreams themselves do take place in psychic or mental areas connected with your daily activities, in which case no dressing-up process is necessary. But in the very deep reaches of sleep experience — those, incidentally, not yet touched upon by scientists in so-called dream laboratories — you are in communication with other portions of your own identity, and with the other realities in which they exist.

(Pause at 10:43.) Now often the ego acts as a dam, to hold back other perceptions — not because it was meant to, or because it is in the nature of an ego to behave in such a fashion, or even because it is a main function of an ego, but simply because you have been taught that the purpose of an ego is restrictive rather than expanding. You actually imagine that the ego is a very weak portion of the self, that it must defend itself against other areas of the self that are far stronger and more persuasive and indeed more dangerous; and so you have trained it to wear blinders, and quite against its natural inclinations.

The ego does want to understand and interpret physical reality, and to relate to it. It wants to help you survive within physical existence, but by putting blinders upon it, you hamper its perception and native flexibility. Then because it is inflexible you say that this is the natural function and characteristic of the ego.

(Following his pattern of late, Seth wound up the session with a couple of pages of other material. This time the data concerned the reasons behind Jane’s years of training in writing poetry and fiction. It was very astute, I thought. Seth explained how Jane’s poetry had always been “a creative offshoot of her desire to understand the nature of existence and reality, her way of probing psychically… into other realms… a method of investigation and a method of exploring the results.”

(Her fiction, Seth added, was Jane’s “way of probing probabilities and of trying to understand other people. All of her [writing] is a part of her creative life, but now she is investigating the nature of reality far more directly…. There is a great unity in the personality’s main interests. Nothing will be left behind. The creative self is operating, you see — going exactly where it wants to go.”